PostgreSQL - Replace HTML Entities

Question

I have just set about the task of stripping out HTML entities from our database, as we do a lot of crawling and some of the crawlers didn\'t do this at input time :(

Answer 1

Write a function using pl/perlu and use this module https://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::Entities

Of course you need to have perl installed and pl/perl available.

1) First of all create the procedural language pl/perlu:

CREATE EXTENSION plperlu;

2) Then create a function like this:

CREATE FUNCTION decode_html_entities(text) RETURNS TEXT AS $$
    use HTML::Entities;
    return decode_entities($_[0]);
$$ LANGUAGE plperlu;

3) Then you can use it like this:

select decode_html_entities('aaabbb&.... asasdasdasd …');
   decode_html_entities    
---------------------------
 aaabbb&.... asasdasdasd …
(1 row)